RFC 2318 (rfc2318) - Page 2 of 5

The text/css Media Type

RFC 2318                  text/css Media Type                 March 1998


   (1) external - the style sheet is linked to a document through a
       URI and exists as a separate object on the Web. The media type
       text/css is used when fetching the object, for example in the
       Content-Type and Accept header fields of HTTP [2].

   (2) internal - the style sheet is contained within the document. A
       typical scenario is an HTML [3] document that contains a style
       sheet within the STYLE element. Due to this close relationship,
       HTML and CSS share the same top-level name ("text").

4.  Registration Information

       To: 
       Subject: Registration of MIME media type text/css

       MIME media type name: text

       MIME subtype name: css

       Required parameters: none

       Optional parameters: charset

       The syntax of CSS is expressed in US-ASCII, but a CSS file can
       contain strings which may use any Unicode character. Any charset
       that is a superset of US-ASCII may be used; US-ASCII, iso-8859-X
       and utf-8 are recommended.

   Encoding considerations:

       For use with transports that are not 8-bit clean, quoted-
       printable encoding is recommended since the majority of
       characters will be CSS syntax and thus US-ASCII

   Security considerations:

       Applying a style sheet to a document may hide information
       otherwise visible. For example, a very small font size may be
       specified, or the display of certain document elements may be
       turned off.

       CSS style sheets consist of declarative property/value pairs
       assigned to element selectors. They contain no executable code.

       As with HTML documents, CSS style sheets may contain links to
       other media (images, sounds, fonts, other style sheets) and those
       links are typically followed automatically by software, resulting




Lie, et. al.                 Informational